Reforming Lessons
By Nick Gibb
Recommended on: 12th August 2025
Book of the Year: Reforming Lessons
If you want a powerful, uplifting read about how to turn a struggling education system around — despite the drag of “well-meaning” but harmful inertia — pick up Nick Gibb and Robert Peal’s Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved . Fifteen years ago, England’s schools were in a sorry state. Students were underperforming badly compared with their peers in Singapore and Shanghai, and the air was thick with excuses. The idea of lifting an entire country’s educational performance felt like wishful thinking. But during his ten years as Schools Minister, Nick Gibb — along with like-minded colleagues — did something remarkable: they pushed England sharply upward in international measures like PIRLS and PISA.
The transformation didn’t come from catchy slogans or another layer of bureaucratic “innovation.” It came from visiting classrooms, listening to teachers, and then looking squarely at what the best research showed. The verdict was blunt: teachers were being trained to use progressive teaching methods that sound compassionate but in practice make it harder for students to learn. The reforms loosened schools from state “guidance” that pushed those ineffective approaches and opened pathways for teacher training outside the narrow confines of university faculties steeped in the same ideology. Freed from the dogma mills, schools embraced evidence-based methods — and the gains in reading and mathematics have been striking.
Reforming Lessons isn’t just a policy manual; it’s an encouraging, clear-eyed account of how real reform can be done — intelligently, at scale, and with lasting results. It’s a reminder that standing up to entrenched but misguided orthodoxy is worth the effort, and that when educators are trusted to use methods that actually work, students thrive. England’s turnaround shows what’s possible.
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